(Baseball StL) -- Let’s take a look at who is earning his money on the St. Louis Cardinals and who is not as we near the halfway point in the season.

Several web sites track salaries but baseballplayerssalaries.com applies some metrics for perspective so we’ll use them.

OK, best five values in baseball at the moment are Manny Machado of Baltimore, Matt Harvey of the Mets, Paul Goldschmdit of the D-backs, Josh Donaldson of the As and Matt Carpenter of the Cardinals. No surprise there. At $504,000, Carpenter is a steal.

Worst values for the money? No Birdos there. Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, Dan Haren, Victor Martinez and Barry Zito. See why you shouldn’t sign a pitcher to a long-term deal?

Need more proof? Both Lance Lynn and Shelby Miller are in the top 5 of the cheapest cost per win at about $51,000 and $55,000 respectively. The most expensive? Josh Johnson at $13,750,000 per, followed by Chad Billingsley at $11 million per win, Roy Halladay at $10 million a win and Cole Hamels at just less than $10 million a win.

How are those big pitcher contracts looking now?

Let’s look at the Redbirds. According to baseballplayerssalaries.com, nearly every Cardinal is worth his pay, based on performance. The top 7 are as follows with their team cost vs. performance score in parenthesis:

Matt Carpenter (37.7)

Shelby Miller (24.1)

Lance Lynn (14)

Trevor Rosenthal (8.4)

Daniel Descalso (6)

Matt Adams (5.2)

Pete Kozma (4.2).

A couple of Cardinals are right at that break even line, including:

Matt Holliday (0.1)

Jake Westbrook (0.5)

David Freese (0.7)

Carlos Beltran (0.8)

And two are below the line, but not by much:

John Jay (-1.0)

Ty Wigginton (-2.4)

Tony Cruz is also an underperformer according to the metrics (-3.1) but he has played so little it’s hard to really put him in that category.

But here’s an extraordinary fact: over $33 million in Cardinal salary (that’s about 29 percent) is either on the DL or in the minors.

Chris Carpenter, Jason Motte, Rafael Furcal, Jaime Garcia, Mitchel Boggs, Marc Rzepczynski are all in that category, as well as a handful of minor leaguers.

And more interesting is that the Cardinals are sitting on a potential treasure trove of money due to expiring player contracts, something like $30 million, depending on whether they try to re-sign any of them.

Raises due other players will eat some of that up but a lot of the big money is already known. Some more will go to youngsters due a pay bump but the rest could go to a free agent, if one exists that excites the Cardinal organization.